Book Image

Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI

By : Abdulazeez Abdulazeez Adeshina
Book Image

Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI

By: Abdulazeez Abdulazeez Adeshina

Overview of this book

RESTful web services are commonly used to create APIs for web-based applications owing to their light weight and high scalability. This book will show you how FastAPI, a high-performance web framework for building RESTful APIs in Python, allows you to build robust web APIs that are simple and intuitive and makes it easy to build quickly with very little boilerplate code. This book will help you set up a FastAPI application in no time and show you how to use FastAPI to build a REST API that receives and responds to user requests. You’ll go on to learn how to handle routing and authentication while working with databases in a FastAPI application. The book walks you through the four key areas: building and using routes for create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations; connecting the application to SQL and NoSQL databases; securing the application built; and deploying your application locally or to a cloud environment. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of the FastAPI framework and be able to build and deploy robust REST APIs.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1: An Introduction to FastAPI
6
Part 2: Building and Securing FastAPI Applications
10
Part 3: Testing And Deploying FastAPI Applications

Authentication methods in FastAPI

There are several authentication methods available in FastAPI. FastAPI supports the common authentication methods of basic HTTP authentication, cookies, and bearer token authentication. Let’s briefly look at what each method entails:

  • Basic HTTP authentication: In this authentication method, the user credentials, which is usually a username and password, are sent via an Authorization HTTP header. The request in turn returns a WWW-Authenticate header containing a Basic value and an optional realm parameter, which indicates the resource the authentication request is made to.
  • Cookies: Cookies are employed when data is to be stored on the client side, such as in web browsers. FastAPI applications can also employ cookies to store user data, which can be retrieved by the server for authentication purposes.
  • Bearer token authentication: This method of authentication involves the use of security tokens called bearer tokens. These tokens...